Saul Steinberg: A Biography Part 17

Steinberg in full biking regalia. (ill.u.s.tration credit 41.1) Another physical exercise he used to tire himself out and help him sleep was riding his bicycle on country roads. He bought a first-cla.s.s racing bike and rode it every day into Amagansett, where he stopped to buy the newspaper, then pedaled happily home along a road that paralleled the ocean while allowing his mind to free-a.s.sociate. Going into town entailed a strenuous uphill climb, but the return was fast and fun as he whizzed along downhill all the way. Even in bike riding Steinberg expressed his sartorial elegance, enjoying outfitting himself as much as he enjoyed the actual experience of riding. He decked himself out in a helmet, goggles, leather riding gloves, black spandex tights, and a professional red-and-black jersey like those worn by champion Italian riders. "I am an amazing sight," he crowed, boasting that he cut "quite a spectacle." He found such euphoria in riding the bicycle that he wrote a paean to it, "The Bicycle as a Metaphor of America."

STEINBERG'S RITUALISTIC DAILY ACTIVITIES HELPED TO free his mind to roam through the thoughts and ideas they generated during the 1980s. Practicing Zen offered ways of thinking about how to withdraw from the constant influx of demands on his person and his time, as he learned how to be "inside with oneself in silence, an escape from the constant chatter of introspection and conversation." It was in this period that Zen became one of the many "elective austerities" he practiced in his personal life so that he could concentrate all his energies on creative activity.

He still traveled as much as before, usually finding a way to relate his journeys to work and often adding something pleasurable along the way. After he went to Chicago in early 1983 for the opening of his works on paper and wood at the Richard Gray Gallery, he went to Las Vegas to indulge one of his long-standing pa.s.sions, gambling at the casinos. He was an uncanny gambler who could have been a pro, but this time he had to settle for ultimately losing his winnings, so that "only the pleasure of having won remains."

Steinberg "sitting." (ill.u.s.tration credit 41.2) As he spent more and more time in the country, he took pleasure in cooking simple meals for himself. He, who had always needed the stimulation of company and had gone out almost every night to find it, was now content to spend his evenings listening to music, reading, and drawing. His creative output during this period was just short of astonis.h.i.+ng, as the decade from 1978 to 1988 saw his largest and most sustained contribution to The New Yorker and several publications and major exhibitions. He made many drawings that could not be slotted into portfolios or other categories, which he called "ex votos," saying that they were inspired by biographical reminiscences from either his recent or the far distant past. He compared their genesis to "film exposed sixty years ago and only now developed and printed."

He had no fixed schedule for working but could sometimes start early in the morning and continue off and on until the night, so that friends who lived nearby and wanted to see him knew better than to drop in. They learned to phone first and to stay away when he used his standard expression, that he "could not make plans at the moment." However, when he did want visitors, he suddenly became "a person of impulse" and would insist that they come at once for everything from late-morning coffee to afternoon tea or an early evening drink. But he never invited guests to dinner, for if he ate with others at that meal, he preferred not to entertain but to be entertained by them. On the rare occasion that he initiated an evening meal, he took his guests to restaurants, unless it was during one of his good periods with Sigrid, when she was there to cook.

Steinberg balanced turning inward toward a simpler way of life by deliberately turning outward for the intellectual sustenance he needed, finding it through actively nurtured friends.h.i.+ps with writers. He began a correspondence with Sandy Frazier, who had moved to Big Fork, Montana, which was as satisfying as the letters he exchanged with Aldo Buzzi. He and William Gaddis had a standing date to meet at one of several different East Hampton restaurants every week, and whenever Muriel Murphy had a dinner party, there was always the possibility of a new friends.h.i.+p with someone interesting, such as Joseph h.e.l.ler, whom he met at her table He had always kept a respectable distance from most of the artists of his generation, and few were still alive. He was one of the few trusted friends permitted to visit Bill de Kooning, but it always made him sad to see his old friend's steady decline into senility. Every witty letter from Philip Guston reminded him of how much he missed Ad Reinhardt's caustic postcards. Guston always invited Steinberg to visit his farm in upstate New York, but he never went. He did go to Vermont to see Jim Dine, whose "windowless studio, noisy electrical lighting and unimaginable chaos" were so overwhelming that he had to escape into Nancy Dine's beautifully kept house. Dine was one of the few artists Steinberg liked to talk to, because they always conversed "with pleasure about professional matters, like schoolmates." He liked being in the company of Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell when they were together during their marriage and separately after they divorced, but it was usually they who initiated the contact, and it was almost always in an East Hampton gathering where conversation was difficult. Most of the old friends from the worlds of commercial art and graphic design had either died or moved away, and as Steinberg had not made close friends among the younger generation, he was able to regard this area of art and culture as he perched outside-or perhaps above-the fray. From there, he instigated several important s.h.i.+fts in how he would present his work in the future.

A few years earlier, as the decade began, Steinberg was grudgingly cooperating with galleries and museums that wanted to capitalize on the success of the Whitney retrospective by mounting the same sort of show. Once he became engulfed in the frenzies related to picking and choosing work to exhibit, he realized that he did not want to waste valuable time becoming the chief archival authority of his past, because he had so many ideas for future work. He objected to the canonization of his oeuvre as something fixed and final and would not engage in any activity that even hinted at the closure of his career. Saul Steinberg decreed that there would be no more retrospectives and he would concentrate on what he wanted to do rather than on what he had already done.

He began to put this decree into effect after he allowed himself to succ.u.mb to Arne Glimcher's abilities and charms, and especially to his promise of higher prices and better sales through the Pace Gallery. Glimcher reminded Steinberg "perhaps a bit too garishly" of the late Aime Maeght, but he was also "an excellent person, concise, rapid, even intelligent," and Steinberg knew he could count on Glimscher for "a capable job." His first show at Pace in 1982 did indeed command higher prices and sold so well that it pulled him out of the financial hole he claimed to have been in since 1978.

The exhibition featured new drawings and some of his wooden constructions, and it was an energizing experience to see them so well received. The positive feeling was bolstered when two books appeared in 1983 to confirm that the work he had been doing over the past several years was well received by a public who had not seen it in book form since The Inspector a decade earlier. Both books contained texts provided by distinguished scholars, the critic Roland Barthes for the French All Except You and the poet John Hollander for the American Dal Vero.

Steinberg and Barthes had known and respected each other's work since they had begun a cordial but formal friends.h.i.+p in the late 1950s in Paris. Barthes was well equipped to a.n.a.lyze Steinberg's drawings because Steinberg had been explaining them since 1967, when Barthes had asked about the children's labyrinth at the Milan Triennale and the mural in the courtyard of 5 Via Bigli. Steinberg said they were best understood by first considering the line of "rope" (ech.e.l.le) or "string" (ficelle), for he intended the line to be the internal guide that showed the viewer how to navigate the maze. He asked Barthes to note how the rope became something different as it pa.s.sed across the changing horizon, veering in some places from being water on the ground to a ladder reaching toward a ceiling or an arrow pointing at the sky. He insisted that the artist's ultimate task was to ensure that the viewer needed to make only a minimum effort to grasp and absorb the entirety of the labyrinth, and to realize that everything seen individually is but one of the many elements within the total illusion.

Barthes wrote his essay in French, but from the beginning the book bore the English t.i.tle All Except You. Throughout, he tried to arrive at an overview of the many meanings each individual drawing inspired and to ask what a viewer's lasting impression might be, but however much he wanted to "chase after the being of [Steinberg's] art," it remained elusive. The drawings remained "a mirage ... whose deceptiveness is always put off until later." Barthes called this the true definition of reading, a conclusion that must have delighted Steinberg, the self-described "writer who draws."

The idea for the American book originated with Brendan Gill, Steinberg's friend at The New Yorker, on behalf of the Whitney Museum. Each year a writer and an artist were invited to collaborate on a book that was privately printed as a gift for the select list of donors known as the Library Fellows. Gill asked Steinberg to make the drawings and he in turn asked John Hollander to provide the text. Steinberg told Hollander that he had "a collection of drawings that were unique" for him because they were from "Dal Vero, a la verite," a genre he had consciously avoided publis.h.i.+ng as much as possible. He wanted this group of around twenty or twenty-five drawings to be published, but he worried that they were too personal and therefore not what the book's audience would be expecting from the usual Steinberg, which they could recognize even before they saw his signature. He also worried that because they were all informal sketches from life, they might not be of the same quality as those he had been presenting to the public throughout his career.

Steinberg was a true perfectionist, famous among his friends for discarding and sometimes destroying almost as much of his work as he actually kept. His studio a.s.sistants remember how he studied each finished work with scrupulous intensity before agreeing to let it leave his studio, peering closely as he turned it this way and that, looking at it upside down and sideways; his friends remember how diligent he was about destroying his discards so that it would not be worth the trouble for an unscrupulous scavenger to try to fish something out of his trash can.

Steinberg thought he was taking a huge risk by exposing deeply personal matter. He had always taken pains not to let the public see the people, places, and things he cared about most, and drawing from life made him fear that he was revealing "certain parts" of himself, "areas of vulgarity where I don't tell the truth, making use of what I already know, commonplaces." He was frustrated when "things don't end up the way they should-the results don't live up to the promise." It was the opposite of drawing from the imagination, when, in the guise of the protagonist, he always knew when the work was final and finished, ready to leave his studio and be sent out into the world. But this was the work that made him happy and satisfied, and this was what he wanted to publish. His worry was eased by the thought that he would be working with John Hollander.

Steinberg had known Hollander since the late 1960s, when they were often invited to the same events in New York, and as they both owned houses in Amagansett, seeing each other there as well. It was in Springs that Hollander got the t.i.tle for one of his books of poetry, Blue Wine, when he visited Steinberg and watched him fill wine bottles with an unidentifiable blue substance. He had written about Steinberg in magazines such as Commentary and The Listener and he had written the introductions to the catalogue for Steinberg's Smithsonian exhibition and the new edition of The Pa.s.sport. The two men had many discussions of Steinberg's art throughout the collaboration on Dal Vero, but some years after it was published, they talked more fully about it in a conversation that Hollander remembered long after.

Steinberg told Hollander that throughout his long career, he had always felt "uneasy" about being treated as an artist, for he thought of himself primarily as "a cartoonist who drew for immediate publication." He spoke of the difference between doing graphic art as an ancillary to painting or sculpture and doing graphic art as the necessary consequence for painting, and said he fell between the cracks and crevices that separated the two. Steinberg offered the example of Goya, who also prepared what he called "graphic art for publication." Hollander demurred, saying that he found more resonances between Steinberg and Blake, for "Steinberg was an intellectual cartoonist, a satirist of representation, and Blake was a satirist of conceptual representation." Steinberg said he didn't care who Hollander compared him to or where the art world placed him; what he disliked was seeing his work hanging on walls, for he was far more comfortable seeing it on paper. He objected to the inst.i.tutionalizing of painting and everything connected with the commercial process of getting it out for consumption by viewers; if he did veer into "painting" with these drawings from life, he still wanted their initial appearance to be on paper.

STEINBERG SUBMITTED APPROXIMATELY TWENTY DRAWINGS TO Hollander, almost all of them featuring Sigrid in some sort of repose, reading, sewing, just sitting quietly and often staring off into the distance. He made one double portrait, of Sigrid and Aldo, but mostly, when not drawing her, he captured the objects on the kitchen table, the view outside the studio's sliding gla.s.s doors, Papoose prowling or sleeping sometimes on Sigrid's lap. The only other person besides Aldo whose portrait Steinberg submitted was Harold Rosenberg's, but shortly after, quietly and without an explanation, he withdrew it. Eventually they settled on sixteen drawings to accompany sixteen "prose meditations."

Hollander created a dreamy, s.h.i.+mmering text that matched the tranquillity of the drawings. A reader could move easily between the two, pausing to savor first one and then the other, concluding, as Barthes had done earlier, that they could be approached "endlessly" even as they remained "a mirage." Steinberg, still unsure that he had made the right decision to let the drawings out into the world, told Hollander that they should probably "brace ourselves for more surprises." But there were no surprises when the book appeared, and it did "come out well," praised by the collectors for whom it was intended. Steinberg was proud of this book and pleased that his worries had been for naught.

STEINBERG BROKE HIS OATH NOT TO be involved in any more retrospectives when the University of Bridgeport in nearby Connecticut invited him to become the Dorne Professor in the arts, an honor he accepted proudly. He broke the oath because the exhibition featured (among other artists he liked and respected) Alice Neel, Josef Albers, Mary Frank, Robert Motherwell, Red Grooms, and Louise Nevelson. He learned of an honor of another kind when Rodica Ionesco, the playwright's wife, wrote to congratulate him on being listed in the authoritative French dictionary Larousse. He was described as an "American drawer [dessinateur] of Romanian origin," noted for his humor, satire, and exceptional originality. His name had long been used informally as the adjective Steinbergian, and now the Larousse gave legitimate dignity to this usage. In New York, he graciously accepted the Mayor's Award for contributions to the arts and culture of the city, and an equally impressive invitation came when Saul Bellow invited him to partic.i.p.ate in a "Great Books" conference led by Professor Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago. He took Bellow's request for critiques of his speech very seriously and made many handwritten suggestions for changes on the typescript, which Bellow incorporated into the final text.

He was also broadening his circle of younger friends. One of his neighbors in the Hamptons, the lawyer Lee Eastman, introduced him to his daughter, Linda, and her husband, Paul McCartney of the Beatles. Steinberg gave them all gifts of drawings after he designed the cover for McCartney's alb.u.m Cold Cuts, and when Paul and Linda were eager to have him design another cover, he sent a second drawing as a gift. Linda McCartney said they would be delighted to have it but insisted on paying for it. Michael Kennedy, Robert's son, invited him to a reception for the Nicaraguan politician Daniel Ortega after he addressed the United Nations General a.s.sembly; Steinberg declined, saying that he would see Kennedy and his wife, Eleanore, at another time.

IT SEEMED TO STEINBERG THAT HE had made all the right decisions about putting his personal and professional lives in good order. After he and Sigrid resolved the details of their latest separation, they went to Martinique in March 1984 and had a pleasant holiday. They were both using the Springs house, albeit often in separate bedrooms and at separate times, and when they were together they were able to enjoy casual suppers in "low-rent restaurants" that stayed open during the winter. Steinberg had agreed to have new work ready by 1986 for exhibitions at Maeght Lelong (as the Paris gallery was now known) and Pace in 1987, and his literary agent, Wendy Weil, was hinting strongly that he should be thinking about a new book. Everything seemed under control until several things happened to disrupt his peace of mind.

Ada resurfaced for the usual reason-she needed money. She was living with her husband now, and he was badly crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. She teased Saul with the comment that she had just suffered an infarcto, a heart episode, but neither she nor Aldo (when Saul pleaded with him to find out) explained any further. All this was a prelude to Ada's telling him that there was an opening in a desirable retirement home in Erba, just above Bellagio, and they had been invited to take it. She was reluctant for two reasons: they did not have the money for the entrance fee or the monthly maintenance, and, more important, she was not yet ready to admit she was old enough to live in a home for the elderly. Saul was surprised at how deeply this news upset him.

He had not seen Ada, nor had he corresponded with her, for so long that the thought of resuming the friends.h.i.+p (for that's what it was now), even though at long distance, was quite unsettling. But being his usual generous self, he knew he had to do something, so he phoned her, and the conversation was "magic-return to forty years ago." It awakened his need for frequent telephone contact, which became "strong and essential," as did his need to see that she was well provided for: he gave her the money for the entrance fee to the Casa Pina and made arrangements to deposit a generous monthly stipend of $1,000 into her bank account, plus more whenever she needed it. She had only to ask (and often she did) when she wanted a holiday or vacation or one of her appliances died and she needed a new one. Ada's only other income was the modest support she received from the Italian government, and so Saul willingly became her primary provider for the rest of her life.

He worried about Ada long-distance, but Sigrid was right there, with medical problems that were truly frightening and needed immediate attention. She was always in pain from what she called quite simply "a bad back," and she realized something was seriously wrong only on the day that she tried to jaywalk across a busy Manhattan intersection, when she was in so much pain that she could not walk fast enough to cross the street before the light changed, nor could she lift her leg to mount the curb once she got there. She consulted a neurologist, who sent her to Lenox Hill Hospital for tests, which revealed a large tumor on her lower spine. Immediate surgery to remove it was performed on April 16, 1984. Fortunately, the tumor was benign, but there were other problems, all caused by the deprivations of her wartime childhood diet. There was significant curvature (lordosis) to her lower spine, and she needed a laminectomy to correct it. All told, it was a long and difficult operation which kept her in the hospital and on morphine for a week, but she healed quickly afterward and had an "extremely benign post operative course."

Steinberg took her to Springs and saw to it that she was cared for and coddled. She was still there when it came time to plant the garden in late May, and she was strong enough to put in all the flowers she loved and take delight in doing it. Steinberg thought it "quite lovely-indeed a touching and childish garden, a compensation for her unsteady mind."

But he was kind to her, and she was grateful. There were no tantrums and no depression on her part. He certainly tried to be happy and positive while she was there, but it wasn't easy and nothing seemed to work. In a "gastronomical update," he told Aldo that he was determined to lose weight and get over the insomnia that was becoming fairly constant, and his intention was, "above all, to avoid melancholy." To that end, he stopped drinking liquor again and ate only brown rice and steamed vegetables, a regime he was encouraged to stick to after the eighty-year-old Isamu Noguchi came to spend the day. Steinberg was impressed when they took a long walk and Noguchi strode steadily at a faster pace than his, talking and listening with equal intensity. He thought it would be a good idea to keep Noguchi firmly in mind as a role model, but like so many other good intentions, this one was pushed aside when other crises presented themselves.

CHAPTER 42.

WINDING UP LIKE MY PARENTS.

I see with terror that despite the progress, journeys, books, etc., I'm winding up like my parents, confused and fearful. What a shame ... I remind myself that I'm seventy-one and that I've survived wars and disasters and that hypochrondria, too, will pa.s.s.

Despite all the work he had done on the Springs house, it was old and in need of a constant succession of repairs and renewals, and this time they were all major. Starting with a new roof, the entire exterior needed replacing. The cedar s.h.i.+ngles on the walls were smothered by an ancient tangle of ivy that had caused most them to rot and fall off. Roof and walls had to be stripped to bare boards, reinsulated, and then re-covered. As long as the workmen were there, Steinberg decided they might as well tend to the second-floor bedrooms; new windows and heating apparatus were installed, and the interior was painted. With all that under way, the first floor looked extremely shabby, so he had the walls covered with wood paneling, new windows put in, and interior painting done there as well. But before any of this could happen, the house's entire electrical system had to be upgraded. The "mess" began in the winter of 1984 and was not finished until late summer 1985, all of it happening during a "rotten moment due to complications with Sigrid, the house, work." Steinberg coped by practicing Zen to cultivate "the happiness of a stoic." His outlook was reinforced by his new friend Joseph h.e.l.ler, whose cheerfully ironic pessimism was just the kind Steinberg appreciated.

Just as the house renovations were getting started, his cousin Phil suffered a stroke and died. Although they had not spent much time together, their friends.h.i.+p had deepened through Phil's rambling, stream-of-consciousness letters, which touched on everything from local politics to the satisfactions of work, the love of a good woman, and the importance of family ties. Phil was the only member of the extended Steinberg family with whom Saul felt real affinity, so his death was a serious loss, especially because it was so unexpected. What Saul found most unsettling about Phil's death, however, was that he and his cousin were exactly the same age, seventy. This intimation of mortality hit far too close to home.

With Sigrid, the ups and downs continued despite their supposed once-and-for-all final separation and despite the kindness Saul dispensed during her convalescence. When she wrote another of her ongoing series of accusatory letters, he made an uncharacteristic attempt to mend the breach with a letter of his own. "We have to be careful," he wrote, adding that he loved and missed her. But they were incapable of breaking their old patterns and could not be together for long without a major blowup. Silence once again dominated their interactions in the house, and they were back to communicating via written messages. Steinberg kept a huge supply of paper plates on hand, the ordinary white cardboard ones with fluted edges. He was fond of drawing on the dessert-sized ones, sometimes making masks with cut-outs for noses, other times making household lists or jotting down thoughts that might become drawings. Sometimes he would dash off a drawing pertaining to whoever was seated at his table, and many ended up as valued souvenirs of the people who received them. Sigrid had her own use for the paper plates, as informal bulletin boards on which to post her latest ultimatum, which she always left at his place so it would be the first thing he saw when he sat down to a meal.

And yet when they traveled together they were the most loving of couples. While the house was uninhabitable they took several trips, first to Martinique and Barbados and then to Sanibel Island, Florida, where they had been the year before. They rented the same apartment, on the fourth floor of a condominium that was a short walk from the ocean. Although it was luxuriously furnished and s.p.a.cious, it forced them into closer proximity than they had in Springs, but they managed nonetheless to live in the peaceful harmony that eluded them everywhere else.

When the vacation was over they returned to their separate apartments, and Steinberg abruptly decided that he had to sell his and move. He knew he was behaving irrationally and he knew why: it was how he had reacted since Milan, when he had moved from one student hovel to another, thinking that the cure for his unhappiness would be a new place to live. He told Aldo that making changes to the Springs house whenever he felt the old restlessness brewing was not enough, and said that he was free to conclude-correctly-that he had "changed landlords" instead of changing his bad habits. For a week he attacked the search for a new apartment with the intensity of one of his Don Quixote figures girding to vanquish a pineapple, but after getting no further than reading the want ads, he gave up, and moving became something he only hinted at now and then. Instead of changing landlords, he changed locations through travel.

ONCE STEINBERG WAS BACK IN TOUCH with Ada, her att.i.tude toward him veered quickly from what he wanted, a warm friends.h.i.+p based on a shared past, to her desire for a renewal of the intense s.e.xual pa.s.sion they had enjoyed before the war. He was a little frightened by her love letters and blatant overtures on the telephone, but at the same time he wanted-indeed, needed-to see her. He flew to Milan "first cla.s.s TWA" and checked into one of the best hotels in the city, where Aldo and Bianca met him for dinner that night. The next day he went to Erba and spent the afternoon with Ada before going to Turin to see Consolata Solaroli, a graphic designer he had known and liked for many years, despite her penchant for using green ink, which gave him shudders. On a whim, the day afterward he flew to Zagreb and then to Zurich before returning to Milan to spend his final afternoon with Ada and his last evening with Aldo. He and Ada had come to an understanding that there would always be a very special intimacy between them but that it would be a shared memory and no longer s.e.xual. The next day he flew to Paris for three days of pure holiday, and then back to New York.

WHEN HE ARRIVED, HE WAS STILL under "the beneficent illusion of travel, the illusion of liberty," but the freedom was short-lived: "The mail was waiting, the telephone, and other ch.o.r.es are already closing in." As the new year, 1985, arrived, he settled into his well-heated apartment and seldom went out, and when he did, it was usually for long walks along the avenues and streets of the Upper East Side. Steinberg tried but could not keep himself from falling into a profound "melancholy," his euphemism for periodic bouts of serious depression. This one found him constantly replaying scenes from his past life and immersing himself in reading as a way of coping with angry thoughts about his past humiliations. Books he had once loved were now merely "clever," and if they did help him to sleep, it was only for a few hours, after which he would wake up agitated and fixating on things from the past he had all but forgotten or other "oddities" he was at a loss to explain. "We are the victims of childhood for too long," he said, as he was suffused with inexplicable nighttime anxiety and terror. Despite all the sophistication he had acquired and all the admiration and affection that had been lavished on him since he had left Bucharest, he feared there was no way to avoid "winding up like my parents, confused and fearful. What a shame."

All winter long, as he stayed in the warmth of his apartment, he immersed himself in reading everyone from Tolstoy to Primo Levi; from L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between to Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem. He boasted of reading every writer from Gadda (in the Milanese dialect) to Gaddis to William Ga.s.s, but nothing helped. When summer came, he spent it quietly in the country, sitting in the sun and watching as the last of the work was done by a young and cheerful construction crew, enjoying the days, which he thought sp.a.w.ned the "excellent, pleasurable, sometimes ecstatic insomnia" that gripped him all night long. He coped with his wakefulness by sitting (the term he always used for meditation) for long hours several times each night.

Sigrid caused much of his anxiety, as her behavior veered toward the dangerous, not only to herself but to others as well. She was almost always high, but that did not stop her from driving with reckless abandon. He made the mistake of asking her to pick up his car after routine servicing at a West Side garage and deliver it to his apartment. On the way she went through a red light on Riverside Drive and 89th Street and hit another car head-on. Neither she nor the other driver was hurt, and Steinberg's large Chevrolet sedan had "only a dent." Sigrid found it amusing that the other car, a tiny sports model, was (in her words) "smothered." She was blase about it when she described the accident over the phone, blithely reporting how relieved she was not to get a summons and how, still in a stupor, she had gone to her apartment, got Papoose the cat, and taken off for the country-not the apartment where he was waiting. It was not fair, she told him when she phoned from Springs, that after escaping so many serious consequences, she got a speeding ticket on the Montauk Highway.

Through Evelyn Hofer, a staunch believer in Jungian psychology, Sigrid had begun a.n.a.lysis with Dr. Armin Wanner, who would become the last and longest-lasting of her many therapists. Occasionally she thought she was well enough to see Wanner once a week, but most of the time she had twice-weekly sessions. As time went on, she was often in such distress that she saw him every day, not only for sessions in his office but also for long walks, visits to museums, and other meetings that were more social than clinical. Wanner had her keep a dream journal, writing what she remembered about her dreams of the night before. Instead she was much more engrossed in keeping a detailed diary of her life with Saul Steinberg, and around 198586 the dream journals became sporadic as she filled tablets and notebooks with angry outbursts that described each ultimatum he issued and each outrageous retort or response they inspired from her. One of her diary entries describes the general pattern of most of them: "Basically while we did talk, we found no solution, made no decisions except that he won't go with me anywhere here, chez people, for dinner, etc, so I am stuck." Angrily she added, "Better start looking for new friends, maybe among the other losers in my neighborhood, among the local b.u.ms."

Saul told her the one constant she could depend on from him was what she called "the money question." In 1987 he gave her $31,200 for that year's living expenses and expected her to supplement it with interest from her savings account and money market fund. If he also hoped it would inspire her to seek work, he did not say. Instead of calming her financial concerns, his stipend filled her with rage and resentment. She took one of his best drawings, a gift given at a happier time, to Sotheby's, where it fetched $86,985 at auction. She told him what she had done in a letter, boasting that she had had to do it because he had left her with nothing, not even Papoose, who now lived mostly with him. "Go f.u.c.k yourself," she wrote. "I have nothing left but money and I will take it and run."

Her behavior was fast becoming a public embarra.s.sment, as she did not stop with the Sotheby's auction; she took another of his gift drawings to Arne Glimcher, who quickly sold it for what it was worth, just under $10,000. She thought it should have brought more and wrote Glimcher an angry letter saying that he had taken advantage of her straitened circ.u.mstances and had left her no choice but to accept it. She told everyone who knew Steinberg that Glimcher had gypped her, knowing full well how mortified Steinberg would be when the story eventually got back to Glimcher through the art-world rumor pipeline. Then she went through an "I'll show him [Saul]" phase when she took her portfolio to every gallery in the city, from the high-end uptown establishments to the downtown storefronts and alternative s.p.a.ces. She did not help her presentation by wearing her most bizarre outfits, and her hair was often dirty and unkempt. Most gallerists would not even look at her work, using the standard excuse that they were not taking any new artists just then. She knew museums had their own publications staff, but she went anyway to beg for a job doing the most menial hand-lettering or book design. They all knew who she was, and she enjoyed watching some of them squirm in embarra.s.sment as they turned her away. Many of Steinberg's friends were so concerned about her disheveled appearance and unstable behavior that they wrote cautious letters hinting that something was very wrong with her. Unfortunately, no one, starting with him, knew what to do.

WHILE ALL THIS WAS GOING ON, Steinberg was besieged by death on all fronts, starting with the news that his mother's sister and the aunt he loved most, Sali Marcovici, had died in Israel at the age of ninety-one. He had sent regular support to her since he first earned money after the war, and he continued to send the same stipend for the rest of his life to her daughter, a cousin he remembered as "thin and whining," whom he had not seen since 1930. From the American Academy of Arts and Letters he received a stack of notices of the deaths of members during the previous year, and he spent far too much time shuffling them as if they were a deck of playing cards and obsessing over how old the people had been when they died. Some were people he thought had died long before, so that seeing their names revived them eerily in his mind. "Too late," he concluded, mimicking one of his most famous word drawings, in which Sooner and Faster aim for the stratosphere while Too Late sinks into a murky pond. Rodica Ionesco sent news of Mircea Eliade's death, and Steinberg mourned the news of his pa.s.sing and Primo Levi's, a new friend whom he had not had enough time to get to know. Two days before he died, Bernard Rudofsky, one of the first friends Steinberg had made in America, asked him to come to the hospital; Rudofsky told Steinberg that despite Steinberg's lifelong "indifference," he loved and admired him. Steinberg was shocked because he had no idea Rudofsky felt that way about him. Another death that inflicted strong emotion was that of Jean Stafford, a friend and neighbor in Springs who always delighted him when he saw her running down Fireplace Road toward his house, ready to use her "very unexpected and complicated mind to such devastating advantage." Other neighbors who were old friends died, among them Jimmy Ernst, at whose home Steinberg often ate his Thanksgiving dinner in the company of "all the other doddering old painters, all hard of hearing," and about whom he groused, albeit fondly.

As his collection of newspaper obituaries grew thicker, small comfort came when Brendan Gill advised him not to die on a Friday or a weekend, because it was "poor timing for obits in the Times." Another small comfort came from an article in the New York Times about how new therapies were helping men overcome impotence. He underlined the sentence "people realize that you should, if you want it, have a satisfactory s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p into your 90's."

ALL STEINBERG'S MOORINGS WERE COMING UNDONE, and he felt adrift and unable to tether himself to anything solid. For years he had proudly used the stationery of The New Yorker for his correspondence, often embellis.h.i.+ng the letterhead with the same kind of fanciful drawings he had used earlier to decorate the Smithsonian stationery. Now, for some vague reason he could not define, the magazine that was so vital to his existence had become a less important presence in his life. Searching for the reason why it happened, he compared his changing feelings about the magazine with the death of his Aunt Sali, equating the loss of his professional patria with the loss of people he loved. But then he dismissed this as "exaggerating, perhaps to avoid frightening myself." He thought his drawings were "no longer right for the magazine," and even more alarming was the knowledge that "the idea of making them has no attraction for me." He thought it might have begun when the magazine was sold to Advance Publications, as he shared the view of the majority of the staff artists and writers that the moment the Newhouse family bought it, The New Yorker became "a more vulgar thing, adapted to making a profit." Still, no one expected the shattering announcement that the venerable (and venerated) William Shawn, aged seventy-nine, would be fired with the utmost public humiliation after S. I. "Si" Newhouse offered his job to Robert Gottlieb, who accepted it.

Gottlieb had been a brilliant book editor at Knopf, but he had no experience in magazine publis.h.i.+ng, the point on which the magazine's staff members focused their anger. The staff hastily called a protest meeting at which Roger Angell led them in composing a letter telling Gottlieb that he should not take the job, even though he had earlier made it clear that he would only serve as a "conservator" until a new and permanent editor was appointed. The letter was rightly deemed "an act of self-delusion performed by 153 people who had long spent their working lives in a protected singular world," and when the writers asked longtime contributors to sign, John Updike was among those who acknowledged the hard reality of the changes installed by the new regime and refused. Among those who were upset at the pa.s.sing of the old ways and who did sign were J. D. Salinger and Saul Steinberg. Like so many others, Steinberg was "sad, hurt, infuriated." He asked rhetorically what would become of the magazine now that the new editor possessed "a punk sensibility, convinced that brutality is chic." And then he sent Roger Angell a drawing on the magazine's stationery, embellis.h.i.+ng the letterhead by turning it into a factory, which is what he thought it had become.

STEINBERG WOULD BE THE FIRST TO say that any form of psychoa.n.a.lysis was unlikely to lead anyone to startling new insights into his or her character, but in old age he never stopped a.n.a.lyzing himself, especially about why he was so p.r.o.ne to the increasingly frequent and increasingly long periods of "melancholy." He admitted that whenever he was unhappy, he had doubts about everything and believed that nothing he did or said was good or right. Still, "unhappiness does not affect my reasoning my ideas my imagination," he insisted. No matter how mean a gesture he made in life, nothing impaired his work. It was how he rationalized his increasingly rude behavior, which resulted in a terrible error of judgment sometime in the spring of 1985 that caused anguish and regret for the rest of his life.

No one is sure how it began or what exactly caused it, but sometime in 1985, Steinberg had a serious falling-out with Tino Nivola. It might have had something to do with an inexpensive Polaroid camera, which he insisted he had loaned to Tino, who failed to return it, while Tino claimed he had never borrowed it. No one who knew of this altercation can swear to any part of it with any certainty, but the story of the camera became the tentative explanation others offered after the two men fell into silence, stony on Saul's part, sad on Tino's. The change in Tino's demeanor began in 1982, after he underwent radiation treatment for cancer and went into a remission that left him lethargic and subdued, no longer the cheerful, energetic friend who was always just across the road and ready to stop whatever he was doing whenever Saul wanted to see him. Tino had an "amazing reverence for Saul's genius," and he "utterly, utterly, respected and admired" him. That sentiment never changed, his wife and daughter attested, so that after the discord (whatever it was), there was no sudden break between them; it was more like Tino's "slowly detaching himself from Saul's...o...b..t." The silence continued for three years and was still in effect when Constantino Nivola suffered a fatal heart attack on May 5, 1988.

Claire Nivola phoned Saul to break the news of her father's death. She remembered how he emitted a sound she had never heard before, a "pained cry" that was somewhere between a moan and a cry of anguish. "I'll have to call you back," he said, and hung up the phone. Fifteen minutes later he had gained enough self-control to call and ask for the details of his friend's death. He listened carefully and told Claire to tell her mother that he would be just across the road if she needed him, but he could not be with her in person.

The Nivola family knew how deeply Tino's death affected Saul, but several years had to pa.s.s before he was able to talk to Ruth about his feelings, and then he could do so only over the phone. He told her that it had felt like losing a brother when Ugo Stille died, but "Tino was more than a brother." And then he made an admission that left Ruth at a loss for words, as he had never before revealed himself this way: "Since Tino's death I have tried so hard to break through the asbestos that coats me. Inside, deep inside, I am soft, but I have this exterior coating of asbestos." Ruth thought it was the most intimate and moving conversation she had ever had with Saul and recorded it in her diary.

Steinberg's relations.h.i.+p with the Nivolas, who, after Hedda, Aldo, and Sigrid, were the people to whom he was closest, was always a curiously distant one. Even though there was a time when they all commuted into the city after every weekend, the Nivolas knew better than to ask him for a ride unless they had no other choice, because "it made him feel trapped into having to leave according to someone else's schedule and it made him uncomfortable." They knew that "he did not have natural kindly impulses," but they excused him because "he knew it, and it gave him tremendous guilt and remorse." They knew that he preferred to be generous with money and would always offer a.s.sistance, but only if he could do so from a distance, without personal involvement, for "doing that always made him feel incredibly good." Now that the Nivola children were grown and had gone to pursue their own careers and start their own families, there was only Ruth across the road, and Saul called her "the sole person I know with whom I can commiserate." He continued to accept her many kindnesses, but always on his own terms.

All their friends knew how close Saul had been to Tino, and many sent letters of condolence to him as well as to the family. Among the closest to both men was Henri Cartier-Bresson, who wanted Steinberg to know that he understood his sadness and shared it. Even so, these demonstrations of affectionate concern provided small comfort. Shortly before Saul made the remark that so stunned Ruth, he wrote a message on a sheet of blue-lined memo paper, folded it, and put it inside a file folder that he addressed to himself and sealed shut with folder labels. He affixed a twenty-five-cent stamp with the image of Jack London to it but never put it in the U.S. mail; instead he filed it carefully away among his other correspondence and never looked at it again.

The message was both sad and chilling: "Dear Saul Love from But who loves you?"

"NOW FOR SOME SENSATIONAL NEWS," Steinberg told Aldo when his lawsuit against Columbia Pictures was settled in his favor in 1987. The decision gave him "true primitive pleasure" and was "the glorious dream of every humble individual persecuted by invisible forces." He could not help but crow: "Vindicated in full. A triumph." The lawsuit had dragged on for three long years, until the defendants made the mistake of arguing that their poster was based not on Steinberg's drawing but merely on the same buildings he had used; however, as the buildings were from his imagination and not real, the case collapsed in judgment. After three years of endless meetings with his lawyers, which sometimes left him frightened, confused, and always resentful, he actually enjoyed giving his "endless and quite interesting" deposition. He received $225,858.49 in settlement of the case he called "ST vs. the Scoundrels," and he promptly made photocopies of the checks and inserted them in his appointment diaries. He was so gleeful that he made photocopies of Judge Louis L. Stanton's thirty-five-page decision to pa.s.s out among his friends, and he was quite pleased when Gaddis told him he was thinking of using the legal doc.u.ments as a collage in his next novel.

The case generated a new friends.h.i.+p with Judge Pierre N. Laval, who sent him portions of the opinions in several similar cases and a postcard showing how the city of Edinburgh had copied the poster, hoping that since the case had been settled in Steinberg's favor, it would amuse rather than upset him. Steinberg actually enjoyed it so much that he decided to collect the imitations of what he now always called "that famous New Yorker cover." When friends sent versions from Rome, Florence, Venice, Berlin, and Jerusalem, he told Aldo, "Lo and behold, a pretext to travel to Europe. Or maybe not."

There was another legal matter that needed attention, one that Hedda joking referred to as "when Saul and I divorced our money." Although they remained married, they signed a legal doc.u.ment that "settled the rights and interests" of their money and property and gave them the right to dispose of individual a.s.sets however they wanted. At the time, Steinberg's net worth was $4,669,000 and Sterne's was $3,500,000. Shortly after, he made another legal decision, appointing Sigrid Spaeth to be his agent in a living will, as he "trusted [her] to do the right thing because she knows better than anyone else what I would do."

STEINBERG WAS LEADING SUCH A QUIET LIFE that his cousin Henrietta Danson chided him for not keeping in touch with his family now that he had "dropped out of the limelight." In the past she had been able to keep up with his doings by reading the newspapers, but now, if she did not hear from him directly, she knew nothing. His professional life was busy because of various awards, honors, and exhibitions of his work, all of which generated interviews, articles, and books, but when they were judged against the activity of earlier years, they added up to less.

The Royal College of Art in London made him an honorary doctor at the 1988 convocation, a quiet and low-key ceremony compared to the one at Yale the following June, when he was awarded another honorary doctorate. He was about to decline it when Arne Glimcher insisted that he had to go, and not only that, he had to go in style: Glimcher chartered a small plane to fly Steinberg from Springs to New Haven, a twelve-minute flight, as opposed to the more than two hours it would take by ferry and highway. A limousine met the plane and took him to the Yale campus to meet his hosts, John Hollander and his wife, the sculptor Natalie Charkow. Steinberg broke his ban on being seen in public with Sigrid by inviting her, and since he was allowed as many guests as he wanted, he invited quite a few to the ceremony.

Steinberg was delighted to be in the company of the other honorees, who included Isaiah Berlin, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Stephen Hawking. He went through the ceremony in a daze, accepting "demonstrations of affection from substantial people," and was relieved when it ended and he could board the plane for the short flight back to Springs. The experience was so emotionally exhausting that he fell sound asleep on the flight, and when he woke up, he reminded himself that "the pleasures of vanity are poisonous."

Granted, he was in a deep "melancholy" two years later when he recorded his official version of the event in a diary he had begun to keep, but what he described in 1991 was far from his earlier memory or from those of the people who were with him on that day in June 1989. Everyone else remembered a slight man of impeccable manners, dress, and demeanor who was quietly pleased to wear an academic robe and have a great fuss made over him. But when he summarized the event for the diary, he wrote: "How monstrous. Nervous hosts ... Tension of academics." As for the event itself, "Secretly I thought it was a demeaning honor. Best part the small plane ride pilot and fat girl copilot." His enthusiasm for partic.i.p.ating in the fellows.h.i.+p activities of Yale's Morse College was over: "Bedraggled New Haven, dangerous town."

THERE WERE FOUR MAJOR EXHIBITIONS OF Steinberg's work as the 1980s came to a close, the first at Galerie Maeght Lelong in 1986, followed in 1988 by one at the Galerie Adrien Maeght. Both shows received good sales and positive reviews and were accorded the same enthusiasm that had characterized all of Steinberg's European appearances. In the catalogue for the first, he gave a long, thoughtful interview to Jean Fremon, and the second featured an essay by Eugene Ionesco, his fellow Romanian and good friend. Ionesco was a respected denizen of the literary avant-garde, and his praise was welcome to an artist who sometimes feared that his work was considered mired in a now pa.s.se tradition.

When Steinberg showed his work in Nuremberg at the fourth Internationale Triennale der Zeichnung in 1988, he joked that it was "a kind of personal payback for 1939," as a way to gird against too-high personal expectations. However, essays by Italo Calvino and the museum's director, Curt Heigl, enhanced the catalogue and the show received rave reviews in the German press, further adding to his always positive reception by the German public. It helped some, but not entirely, to mitigate the shock he had received the year before, when he showed his newest work at the Pace Gallery and John Russell wrote a snide, tongue-in-cheek a.s.sessment similar to the one of a decade earlier written after the Whitney retrospective. Russell's second d.a.m.n-with-faint-praise dismissal was unexpected after so many years of nothing but fulsome critical praise, and it was therefore shocking not only to Steinberg but to all his friends. To head off their many attempts to console him, he phoned one after the other to say, "Wow! I've survived," and to tell them that the review didn't matter. Again and again he repeated, "I'm all right," as they railed against Russell. This was unusual behavior for him, as in the past he had always read reviews carefully and usually had something nasty to say about critics who did not praise his work wholeheartedly.

THE INTERVIEWERS WHO CAME TO TALK to Steinberg now were more interested in a.s.sessing the place he would hold in perpetuity than in the immediacy of whatever work he was exhibiting at the time. He was often curt and dismissive with art historians or cultural critics, because he thought they were shortsightedly a.s.sessing his canon as final and finished while he was busy all the time with new work. Despite the Russell review, he did not think his best work was behind him; nor did he think he was merely producing more of the same old tried-and-true. He sincerely believed that he was creating something new each time he put pen to paper.

Steinberg was only interested in talking to interviewers who would let him hold forth about the themes, events, and ideas that engaged him as the decade of the 1980s wound down. He had not given many interviews for the past several years because the press had pretty much left him alone until the recent spate of exhibitions brought him back into their ken. Now that there were new requests to talk to him, he was beset by the same sort of shudders he had felt after the Whitney retrospective, and just as he had refused then to collect, collate, and preserve his past, he insisted on doing the same now.

His resentment against becoming "an acquisition" for collectors intensified, but once his work was sold, there was little he could do to control what became of it. He railed against pressures from all those in the art world "who understand nothing but profits and sniff them out. Still upset over "the famous poster," he was further outraged when The New Yorker "published an ugly book" that included seventy of his covers, "poorly printed, shrunk down, mixed in with vulgar stuff." In this instance, the magazine owned the rights and did not even notify Steinberg, "so I'd better defend myself," he concluded. What he meant was that he needed to take an active role in overseeing anything about his work that was being put into print.

He moved immediately to take a commanding role when two of his most astute buyers, Jeffrey Loria and his then wife, Sivia, decided to produce a book of their collection in connection with its exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. The Lorias both had backgrounds in the art world and were perceptive about what would be important and lasting, so they purchased accordingly. In Steinberg's case, they were interested in the chronological development of the artist's oeuvre and especially how a drawing came into being, so they bought early versions of work in progress as well as the finished drawings. Their collection (to name only some) ranged from Steinberg's 1940s Manhattan taxis to some of his various Main Streets to several series of studies: "View of the World from 9th Avenue," "The American Corrida," and "Lexington and Wils.h.i.+re."

With his semi-antagonistic att.i.tude toward collectors, Steinberg resented having his work presented in book form by someone other than himself and wanted as much control over the project as he could claim. The Lorias were delighted to have his partic.i.p.ation, as it gave a special imprimatur to the book, even though they were aware from the beginning of how stubborn he could be about its appearance. Jeffrey Loria asked the distinguished book designer Nathan Garland to be in charge of the project and told him when he signed on that Steinberg would be "a definite problem." Loria told Garland to "be firm," and Garland did try, "but in the end, Steinberg got almost all of what he wanted." Garland thought that many of Steinberg's ideas about book design were the insights of a "genius, but in many others, he was just wrong. I deferred to him always but it was really wrong to let him get away with it."

In the end, Steinberg groused about the book but was also pleased with it. He told John Updike that his introduction made him "happy to be taken seriously by a man whom I admire," but he arrived at this opinion only after a fairly extensive exchange of correspondence concerning the rewriting of "sensitive spots" where he thought Updike was "over-nationalizing [his] art as the product of a Romanian looking at the U.S." Updike explained that "the t.i.tle and drift" of the book had led him to this emphasis, but he was happy to revise and eliminate as much "discomfort" as Steinberg wanted. Steinberg was more swiftly satisfied with Jean Leymarie's "appreciation," which had not required as much rewriting. Whereas Updike praised Steinberg for his vitality in conveying "national symbols," calling him a "visual philosopher who continues wonderingly to trace our tribal markings," Leymarie acknowledged Steinberg's affinity with Joyce and Nabokov, saying that he shared their "cult of style, and predilection for parody, as well as an ambition for the universal and a quest for the autobiographical."

This was exactly the "context" Steinberg wanted for his work, and he could not have said it better himself. But by the time this generous praise came, his "melancholy" had become crippling depression and he was unable to appreciate it.

CHAPTER 43.

THE LATEST NEWS.

What I do these days is to review the past, revive the past.

Sometime in mid-June 1989, the cat Papoose disappeared, and Steinberg and his friends and neighbors spent the next two weeks combing the area as they tried unsuccessfully to find him. Saul was alone in Springs, so he phoned Sigrid in New York and she came at once, distraught and weeping. Papoose was fifteen and, though not in obvious bad health, had been noticeably slowing down for some time. Saul thought he had become "Sigrid's cat" as he aged, following her everywhere and walking slowly like the old men Saul remembered trudging along on Mexican roads. He didn't realize the intensity of his own attachment until the cat was gone, when he enumerated Papoose's human qualities, "courage, grace, and dignity, a true man." Many months later, when he could not stop mourning, he told Hedda that of all the people he loved who had died, he missed Papoose the most. And then he corrected himself to say that he still missed Lica just as intensely, even though she had been dead for sixteen years.

For the entire month of July, Saul and Sigrid and the others searched the surrounding roads and woods, and in late August, Gordon Pulis found Papoose's body. Saul and Sigrid buried him with the full dignity they believed he deserved. Hidden in the trees behind the house was the remnant of a Revolutionary War cemetery, with one tombstone still standing over the solitary grave of a young girl. It seemed a fitting spot, and Sigrid told Saul that when she died, if she could not buried in Africa, she wanted to lie next to the cat, but to make sure she was facing east, toward the continent she loved so much. He told her she would have to make her own arrangements, as he was much older and would be the first to go.

Steinberg with Papoose. (ill.u.s.tration credit 43.1) With the death of Papoose, the most important of the few remaining bonds that held them together was severed, but they still could not separate entirely. Several months later, Sigrid was back in New York, begging to be allowed to come to the house and medicating herself far more heavily than before, while Saul was stubbornly solitary in Springs and starting an antidepressant regimen that lasted the rest of his life. He began with Prozac, then changed to Zoloft, and after that he took Librium. The depression that began after the cat died was different from previous ones, in that every peripheral thing irritated and upset him.

When Tina Brown became the editor of The New Yorker in October 1992, Steinberg was still so incensed over Shawn's dismissal that he refused all her overtures to persuade him to submit new drawings. He called S. I. Newhouse "a perfect s.h.i.+t" and threw out his stash of the magazine's stationery because the content had become "stupid" and he no longer wanted to be a.s.sociated with it. "Who would have thought it?" he asked-"a real divorce, which should have happened years ago." It was wrenching to cut himself off, and it left him unmoored and adrift, asking rhetorically where his real patria was and whether he still had one. His refuge was no longer the magazine, nor was it the Pace Gallery; Sigrid and Papoose had been his anchors for years but "less now," he concluded sadly.

HE WOULD NOT LET SIGRID COME to Springs and he could not stand to be alone in the house during the winter because bad weather made everything "disappear." He hastened to the city and decided that all he had left to hold on to was "75th and Park and my apartment." He made a series of drawings of his neighborhood, one of which eventually became a New Yorker cover, a simple collection of white street grids with yellow squares for the buildings, a red X carefully marking the location of his. By the 1990s, Lexington Avenue, where he had enjoyed walking, daydreaming, and window-shopping since his earliest days in New York, had become dark, frightening, and infested with aggressive beggars. Homeless people slept in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk directly opposite his building, some of them covered incongruously in colorful silk or velvet rags they had pulled out of dumpsters. "How frightening! Baghdad!" he declared as he drew chaotic cityscapes to capture the impression. There was a citywide strike of all the workers in apartment buildings and tenants had to take over the maintenance; Steinberg was a.s.signed a day of "desk duty" to answer the phones and monitor the traffic in and out of the building. Mostly he read the papers and hoped he would not have to interact with his neighbors, particularly the "slightly unbalanced" woman who lived above him, who was "the daughter of Somoza, the old butcher of Nicaragua." His once vibrant neighborhood reminded him of Russia and was "as dead as Wall Street."

There was a momentary lull in Steinberg's self-pity when Saul Bellow came to town and invited him to meet Janice, his newest wife. It was the second pleasing event in a row, for the previous night he had dined with President Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia, who flattered him with such a fulsome declaration of "devotion" to his books that the "depressed state of [Steinberg's] soul" was momentarily raised. Otherwise, he was beset by "the dark winter, some rotten accurate news [about the Persian Gulf War], other stuff like my teeth, which make my life ridiculous and destroy my appet.i.te." Extractions and implants made eating a ch.o.r.e, but even worse, they reduced his stamina so that he could not work for the same length of time or with the speed and precision of his younger days. He experienced "drowsiness, ill temper, doubts about everything." He still could not get over how much he missed Papoose and how the cat continued to be "an important character" in his life. Sigrid was hurting too, but Saul was worried about something other than how she was dealing with the cat's death.

After Sigrid told him that every time she went to Mali she was s.e.xually involved with a tribal leader she called an "African prince," Saul scheduled AIDS tests for them both. There was a momentary scare when his physician requested an additional blood sample, but in the end both he and Sigrid were declared "negative for antibody to HIV-1." Although he continued to collect articles explaining how men could enjoy s.e.x well into their nineties and pamphlets that showed the positions they should use after hip replacement surgery or back injury (some of which he attached to the AIDS test results), by the time of the tests in February 1991, his s.e.xual relations.h.i.+p with Sigrid was virtually over and he looked for partners elsewhere. Whether it was the specific idea of her being with an African